iPhone not guilty of college Wi-Fi attack

US university finally tracks down the real culprit

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A US university has had to backtrack on claims that the Apple iPhone was causing problems on its Wi-Fi network. Duke University had accused the so-called JesusPhone of polling its Wi-Fi network thousands of times per second, causing it to fall over. Now the real culprit has been found.

The 150 iPhones on campus were blamed because they kept asking for a router address which was deemed invalid on Duke's campus network. When iPhones couldn't get the address, they kept asking - up to 18,000 times per second, and than in turn caused the university's Cisco wireless LAN to fall over.

iPhone as scapegoat

In a statement issued last Friday, Cisco said it had "worked closely with Duke and Apple to identify the source of this problem, which was caused by a Cisco-based network issue. Cisco has provided a fix that has been applied to Duke's network and the problem has not occurred since."